Finals of the Third China Urban Rail Transit Scientific and Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition Held in Beijing

Under the guidance of China’s energetically-boosted strategy of building itself into a powerful country through traffic construction, on July 23, with the joint sponsorship by UCD, Tsinghua University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Tongji University, Southwest Jiaotong University, and Shenzhen University, the National Finals of the 3rd China Urban Rail Transit Scientific and Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition and the Awards Ceremony was successfully held in Beijing.

There were three categories for the competition: basic research, promotion and application, and owner proposition. More than one thousand projects signed up for the competition were screened at various levels, and a total of 64 projects became qualified for the national finals, including 34 "best solution projects" in cities where 154 "owner propositions" were put forward based on key and difficult actual technologies and innovation needs.

Ten academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering were invited to form a finalist jury for the national finals of the competition, who strictly guarded the pass for project plans, team members, innovation highlights and value analysis for all final projects, and selected through appraisal the "Excellence Award", "Outstanding Award", "Winning Award" and "Innovation Award" for the finals on the morning of July 23. While the aforesaid four awards were being decided on, the final roadshow of questions and answers was open for on-site observation, and the “projects that attract the most market attention” were voted on by the competition’s venture capital judges and owner judges on the spot. In addition, the selection results of the "Most Popular Projects", which had been voted by more than 100,000 people in the early stage of the finals, also took place on July 23 along with the above-mentioned awards. All appraisal results for the finals were revealed at the award ceremony held in the afternoon.

On the afternoon of July 23, a series of links including guest speeches, activity review, expert comments, project awards, project presentation, innovation signing, platform introduction, prospecting ceremony were set up for the award ceremony for the finals of the competition. More than ten academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and national engineering survey and design masters, representatives of the governments, industry organizations, universities, and urban rail transit construction and operation units attended the ceremony to witness the event.

At the award ceremony, Wang Hanjun, chairman of the Rail Transit Branch of the Chinese Society of Civil Engineering and general manager of UCD, delivered a speech on behalf of the organizers expressing sincere thanks to leaders at all levels, industry colleagues, all sectors of society, and friends from the media who cared about and supported the competition. He introduced the purposes of the organization and services of the competition, achievements scored and industry and social influence produced. He hoped to continue to work together with all parties on the industry platform to jointly contribute wisdom and strength to serve the high-quality development of urban rail transit.

At the "Awarding Ceremony" of the grand event, Li Guoqing, Secretary of the Party Committee of UCD, presented awards for the projects winning "Innovation Award" on behalf of the organizers and the leaders of universities and government agencies. Pei Hongwei, deputy secretary and general manager of the Party Committee of BUCG, and chairman of UCD, presented awards for the "Most Popular Projects" and "Most Market Focused Projects", and came up to the stage together with the seven academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering being at the ceremony to present awards for the projects winning "Excellence Award" and "Outstanding Award".

The "innovation docking" service provided by the platform of the competition has offered exhibition and promotion, venture capital guidance and incubation training for the competition projects, releasing nearly 100 school-enterprise scientific research or industrialization cooperation intentions, and facilitated the signing of agreements for the cooperation between a multitude of innovation projects. When the signing of innovation agreements was conducted, representatives from eight universities including Tsinghua University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Tongji University, Southwest Jiaotong University, Shenzhen University, Southeast University, Beijing University of Technology, Wuhan University signed innovation agreements respectively with more than ten enterprise representatives on site. UCD’s general manager Wang Hanjun, among others, signed an agreement on a bilateral cooperation project "Machine Vision" with Mr. Dai Wei, vice president of Lenovo Group.

When the "Platform Introduction" was conducted, the public platform "Future City Explorer" jointly created by the competition organization alliance officially launched the IP image collection activity. While focusing on professional fields, the "Future City Explorer", a public platform, attaches great importance to the publicity of science and technology and humanities towards the public. A number of columns such as “Innovation Story” “The Most Beautiful Urban Rail Transit” “Science and Technology Map” “A Carbon-related Probe into the Future” “Public Research” unveiled by the platform have attracted much attention from the public, and will also be a completely new propaganda carrier for promoting industrial technological innovation.

The competition is a national public welfare competition in the urban rail transit field in China with the widest participation, the largest number of participants and the highest of technology brands. The innovation fits in the “Industry+” concept of the urban rail transit and, with“Innovation Integration and Green Development” as the theme, it has formed the national competition organization alliance covering "Politics, Industry, Education and Research". The competition carried out the "Double Entrepreneurship School-Enterprise" cooperation initiative, went deep into more than 30 colleges and universities across the country to launch the "campus trip" special activities, provided internship employment positions, and organized 47 national academic exchange activities around the industry frontier hotspots, realizing the transformation and upgrading of the event "1.0" to the "2.0" platform for innovation and entrepreneurship.

At the end of the award ceremony, Pei Hongwei, deputy secretary of the Party committee of BUCG came up to the stage together with leaders and representatives of industry organizations to jointly start the new goal of upgrading and building the "2.0" platform for innovation and entrepreneurship into China's urban rail transit industry science and technology innovation ecological alliance "3.0" in the hope that the new goal is to be driven by the dual-wheel innovation of technology and talents to make more contributions to the urban construction, economic development, and a better future for people's travel in China.